Re: For those interested in the CRM/Entity management

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

On 5/29/07, David Tangye <..hidden..> wrote:
> That seems to be going in the right direction. It would be nice to
> have comments on the columns, but the usage of most can be guessed by
> good naming.
>
> Two questions:
> 1. Column "entity_class  (not null)" in TABLE "entity": is it
> something like "current_default/primary_class", whatever that might
> be?

Ok.  Think of an entity as a "legal person" (corporate or natural) and
a contact as a "natural person."  The idea is that each entity has one
primary class and may have many auxiliary classes.  So an entity can
be a customer, a vendor, etc. all at once.

> 2. The term and term fragment "class" (assuming it means "our way of
> classifying the entities") might be better understood using the term
> and term fragment "role". Term fragments class/group/type are all
> shallow terms in entity/logical modelling. What we want to know is WHY
> we are classifying/grouping/typifying an entity.

Think of possible classes as any of (lead, customer, vendor, member,
any that might be added later).  I tend to think of "role" as being
somethign that defines what something defines what something does,
while this allows us to essentially categorize legal persons with
whome we do business or intend to do such business.

> The reason for making
> the classification/grouping/typification is usually the best term to
> use. In this case we are classifying based on the role the entity has.
> Therefore "role" is a better choice than "class" in this model. Before
> you go further I would rename "class" to "role" everywhere that it
> occurs in this physical model.

Wouldn't that get confusing when we implement "role-level security" for users?
> Later you might also classify entities in another way, eg based on
> whether they are current or not, alive or dead perhaps.
>
> (Rules for classification can be implicit in events/transactions that
> change the state of an entity(in logical modelling) from oe state to
> another, and be explicitly or redundantly recorded in both the logical
> and physical models as classifications.)

I would suggest that both role and class are both well understood
English terms relating to divisions based on the nature of the
interaction.  Since Role is intended to be used elsewhere, I would
suggest we stick with class.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers